


The Secret of Life

by ncfan



Series: The Golden Age of Konoha: The Founders [5]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Backstory, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-05
Updated: 2013-03-05
Packaged: 2017-12-04 09:34:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 723
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/709263
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ncfan/pseuds/ncfan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hashirama decides that he will change the world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Secret of Life

The boy is born to a Senju woman in the autumn; she was not married and will not name the father. This is common enough, in such times, and the by-blows of the women of the clan are looked upon more kindly than those of the men, so long as the child's father does not attempt to assert his paternal rights.

The boy is named Hashirama, and from birth he seems warm. Not just warm in the sense of being physically warm or having a kind spirit—he practically radiates his own light and heat, glimmering at the tips of his hair and as pinpricks of stars beneath his warm brown skin. He is the son of no one important, just a child of a cadet branch, but from his earliest days he is talked about in the Senju clan, whispered about with wonderment and a keen, half-realized hope.

Hashirama first starts to notice it when he's around four years old. He's huddled at the edge of a blood-soaked battlefield with two older children, waiting for his mother. This battleground was once a farmer's field, a rice paddy. Bodies float in the dank, bloody water, and the crops are ruined. The Senju's intent had been to capture the paddy without trampling the crops—it's been a rough year, with a shorter growing period than usual thanks to unseasonable frosts, and the Senju are in desperate need of food and croplands. However, the battle raged on longer and harder than anyone had expected, and the crops are ruined.

Hunger growls in his stomach and Hashirama stares out at the field. He is too young to understand war and why it is fought, but he knows that it is the reason that he and his cousins and all of his kin will go hungry tonight, and for many nights afterwards.

 _And why should it be like this?_ A foreign voice, adult and angry, sounds in his head. _Why should the world burn and children go hungry in their beds? Why should wives be torn from their husbands, husbands from their wives, and all from their friends?_

_You… There's something you can do, at least…_

As if possessed, Hashirama steps up from his hiding place in the shadow of a gnarled tree. Toka and Daiki, his cousins, hiss at him to come back and wait to be told that it's safe to come out, but Hashirama does not hear. Kinsmen and servants of the clan pass by him without a care for the child, weary, bloody, leaning on each other for support. Hashirama stares at the bodies floating in the water. He stares at the ruined rice crop, trampled and pressed down into the mud. A great pressure clamps down on his head like a vice, a burning in his throat.

And then, the paddy explodes back into life.

Great rice plants, more than seven feet tall, their stalks so bright a green that they hurt the eyes, stretch up towards the sun in a half-second. The rice grains are fat and full, quivering in the wind, and those still in the field let out cries of shock and alarm. Others whoop with laughter. In time, a very recent time, all will stare at this miracle and rejoice.

Hashirama knows… He doesn't know how he knows, but he knows that he was the one who did this. He was the one who made new rice plants grow to replace the ones that had been trampled this day. He goes about telling anyone who will listen, but no one believes him until, one day in the middle of the place where the Senju have made their camp, Hashirama goes out in a crowd, everyone watching him, and calls up a great apple tree out of the hard earth, heavy with fruit well past the season to be bearing it.

They call him the resurrection of the Sage. Hashirama is called on again and again to use his skills in the betterment of his clan, pressed into battle far younger than most would be, touted as the hope of his clan.

All of this matters little to Hashirama. He remembers the voice that had sounded in his head that day, old and weary with the weight of ages, and resolves to himself that he will change the world.


End file.
